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Deere, Kansas university combine to upgrade business development

Deere is working with a Kansas university to foment relations with entrepreneurs.

A Kansas State University institute is working with more than 2,000 projects as part of an initiative to develop business, according to a published report.

One of those projects involves John Deere construction equipment, which sees the school's Advanced Manufacturing Institute cultivating relations with entrepreneurs, fostering the growth of innovative projects and meeting specific goals that have been set, a member of the business development team said.

"As an example, the current state of the industry for refueling operation for locomotives is about 200 gallons per minutes," Jeff Tucker told the Lions Club on Tuesday. "The problem is that by that standard it's slow, and there's also a lot of leakage, so it's easy for that spillage to get off into the ground. We're working with an entrepreneur who has a different idea, basically re-adapting the refueling technology used for aircraft, and we're able to get that up to 600 gallons per minute and eliminate all the spillage."

The institute's work would seemingly be commensurate with Deere, a company that sets high priority on innovating its lineup of machinery and equipment available at a John Deere dealership.

"What we do is typically we're working with specific technologies and industries on projects that are going to be a new product for a manufacturing process," Tucker said. "We also work with companies on a strategic level--helping them with new markets, helping them get into new technologies, and most recently, we're also starting to work with communities."